San Antonio College Library

A collection of eighty essays exploring the personal beliefs of a diverse assortment of contributors, both famous and unknown, who reflect on their faith, the evolution of their beliefs, and how they express them. Based on the NPR series of the same name, This I Believe features eighty essays penned by the famous and the unknown--completing the thought that the book's title begins. Each piece compels readers to rethink not only how they have arrived...

In Scepticism and Animal Faith, Santayana analyzes the nature of the knowing process and demonstrates by means of clear, powerful arguments how we know and what validates our knowledge. The central concept of his philosophy is found in a careful discrimination between the awareness of objects independent of our perception and the awareness of essences attributed to objects by our mind, or between what Santayana calls the realm of existents and the...

"The Will to Believe" addresses several of the most important and perplexing problems of philosophy. In ten lucid essays James deals with such subjects as causality and free will, the definition of the good life and the Good itself, the importance of the individual in society, and the intellectual claims of scientific method. Linking all these essays, most of which were delivered as lectures to popular audiences, is James's deep belief that philosophy...

"This book explains how beliefs that are strange to us were once widely accepted. It sets out the intellectual world of men and women in the distant past, and shows how their assumptions and expectations allowed them to believe things that we cannot: that heresy and witchcraft posed a threat to society, that demons carried people through the air, and that the dead occasionally wandered from their graves."--Jacket.

The uniqueness of the United States of America sets it apart from any other country; people from all over the world come to our shores in pursuit of a way of life that is found nowhere else. Unfortunately, the once shinning light on a hill that America once was is growing dim. If the American people do not awaken from their slumber, take an active role in preserving what our founders and forefathers created and willed to us, that shining light will...

"Legend and Belief is a descriptive and analytical study of the legend, the most prolific and characteristic form of folklore in contemporary Western civilization. Not that the legend does not have ancient roots; like the tale, the joke, the ballad, the proverb, or mummery, it was part of an archaic, preindustrial tradition. But the legends - as old as conversation and debate about problems of the human condition - has been able to survive the technological...

"In this lively journey through human psychology, bestselling author and creator of the You Are Not So Smart podcast David McRaney investigates how minds change-and how to change minds. What made a prominent conspiracy-theorist YouTuber finally see that 9/11 was not a hoax? How do voter opinions shift from neutral to resolute? Can widespread social change only take place when a generation dies out? From one of our greatest thinkers on reasoning, HOW...

Shermer demonstrates how our brains selectively assess data in an attempt to confirm the conclusions (beliefs) we've already reached. Drawing on evolution, cognitive science, and neuroscience, he considers not only supernatural beliefs but political and economic ones as well.